raymi/lauren

i reviewed your book for SCHOOL so it is a bit schooly but if i was you i’d still perk my ears/eyes

ashleigh

i’ve just copied it in the email for easiers sake

The things that block the door from our inside world to our outside world are hard to describe let alone destroy. Can we ever write about what we really mean? And if we manage this, will the words be understood as they were meant? Lauren White’s book, Marketable Depression, is the closest thing I’ve ever found that answers, yes. Beyond just honest execution, White writes like a machine gun. A firing machine gun, spinning rabidly under your parents bed, a new revolution with every page. Stay in the room. You won’t get shot.

The title is right, depression is marketable. “Nobody wants to read a book written by a healthy and stable boring girl who wears pretty dresses and hangs out at the library.” According to White, depression is even better in the flesh, explaining the magnetism she has in life. “Like see there is an enchanting girl over there and she has a pretty face and is also a well-seasoned drinker and she will definitely be mean to you. Guys love that shit I guess maybe because they think they can rear her and save her and change her and make all the demons go away.”

White proclaims her book “isn’t the Bell Jar or Prozac nation”. Maybe not, but they’re definitely related, if only an illegitimate relative accounted for in the tabloids because it was born with a tail. What separates Marketable Depression from every other memoir about a young girl and her black self absorbed existence is that it’s less pretentious in the scholarly sense, and is an absolutely contemporary account of fuckedupness. The shit is going down so to speak, and White is holding on to this eroding cliff with shit resistant mittens singing, as opposed to screaming, HELLO, in notes that resonate and pull falling debris back to the edge of the world. The process is mesmerizing. Like a good memoir should do, you’ll identify with White’s words, maybe even highlighting some and writing a corresponding comment in the margin. The book actually coins this very routine as, “what miserable people do. They find books written by other miserable people and they say HA! That’s me! This book is about ME! And they underline passages and copy quotes into their journals and blogs which is pretty harmless though after a while gets a little bit out of hand when the person identifies so much with the characters that they put their heads in ovens and take lots of pills and have never known what normal is suppose to be.”

White is cool. In describing her life she reveals an astute relationship to pop culture, a hierarchical one in which she reigns king. On the modern aesthetic, White writes, “and because I am so damn pretty I can get away with boring outfits. That’s what’s hip right now. Pretty face + boring outfit = I want to talk to that person and everything they do is brilliant.”

Earlier, I wrote singing instead of screaming because there’s a lot of humour in the book, specifically in her advice. “If you are sad in high school just fucking finish and move to a big city. Get over yourself. Holy fuck. Just give yourself a weird haircut, do some drugs and call it a day.” See what I mean? She continues, warning how, “you cannot run from yourself as much as you think that you can. You just can’t and so all the time you spent lying down on the couch upside down in your family room in xyz suburbia you will spend just as much time doing the same in xyz big city except it is ten times more pathetic in the city because then you get to see how much of a failure you are…your parents and loser old friends can’t see you watching shitty television and eating grilled cheese sandwiches with asshole roommates. Good for you. Clap Clap.”

But of course, the book is more than a memoir the back cover proclaims as being about “everything that has happened as a result of depression.” Also included are drawings and short stories. “Crazy Girl” is a fictional tale I suspect more telling of White’s reality than the bulk of the book. The narrative poignantly depicts the nature of creative celebrity and the love-hate relationship artists have with their monsters that sometimes scare and sometimes shelter. The final line of this exert, actually the beginning of the next paragraph, explains why White is so difficult to quote. I never know where to cut her off because her thoughts are like a Lego tower in an anti-gravity play room. “I feel really fucked up right now and confused because this motherfucker has chosen me out of all the people in the world to obsess over, he has chosen me and it is all my fault because I put myself out there, because I have allowed for myself to be interesting enough to be taken captive and the star of a kidnapping reality show for one’s own private entertainment. There are rooms full of all the things I won back home. He has duplicated everything and then some, save for the wardrobe. I am not allowed to wear pants”.

Beneath White’s in-your-face communication there are softer moments that stick out like a tired butterfly resting on a rotting but appetizing compost heap. “Here’s the thing, I really wanted to be that girl you see when you dream of coffeehouses. I want to be thought of as shy and clever and pretty. And my greatest downfall is that I care what people think of me too much and so do you.” Again, “I know that one day when I have a car and something goes wrong, I’m just going to drive and drive and drive until I am in the desert, until my hair dries out and turns golden white, until I am wearing cowboy boots and listening to crackly static on the radio and I have a bottle of scotch whisky between my legs, until I reach that tiny payphone and call you up and tell you to meet me by the cactus and the lagoon, until you are the last voice I hear before I am gone.” And then she ashamedly pulls the cover over this momentary vulnerable nakedness and follows with, “You know stupid romantic bullshit like that”. I hate that final negation. Those were my two favorite passages in the book because they were stabbingly unguarded. They were spectacular because White is refreshingly true throughout and these lines go even further by letting go of that indescribably something that gave the rest of the book it’s flavor. And I loved that flavor, but this new flavor hides the taste of food less, is braver still, and perhaps indicative of her next work.

This is where I end so you can read Marketable Depression for yourself. It’s like that intoxicated conversation you had in a basement bar you chose for it’s anonymity and sat next to a guy you chose because you were above him and therefore would get nice things whispered in your ear that make you feel less like drinking fresh concrete. But the guy turned out to be, like God, cutting up your mind and putting it back together like a puzzle that fits even though the picture is unrecognizable. Wait, what did I just equate Lauren White to?